Watts Water Technologies

How Dapr enabled lightning speed development at Watts Water Technologies

Challenge

Watts Water Technologies is dedicated to providing cloud connectivity for all of our smart and connected devices, including boilers, water heaters, and mixing valves. We’ve been on a journey to build powerful digital experiences to accompany our smart and connectable devices that deliver meaningful incremental value to our customers. In the last two years, with a team of 40 engineers we’ve built two new cloud-native products that leverage Dapr, Nexa and Watts Vision+.

Nexa was born from a vision to leverage Watts hardware (IoT sensors, equipment, and gateways) and cloud native technologies to give customers a near-real-time view of their water system and connected devices. Nexa, in a way, is an observability platform for commercial buildings’ water systems that also provides a digital twin experience. It offers customers continuous alerting and monitoring that previously didn’t exist alongside key features such as leak detection and water shut-off capabilities.

During the project kickoff for Nexa, we spent a lot of time researching and evaluating technologies that we believed we’d need in order to build a real-time, event-driven system that scales as telemetry scales. We also knew open source was going to be a key differentiator for us to be successful launching Nexa within the time constraints. We started out with the simple things: configuration, storage, message bus, and different services satisfying core parts of the system; what was missing was the glue holding it all together.

We designed architecture ‘blueprints’ for the system, and then began plugging in technologies on the CNCF landscape that would solve our use-cases. One of the biggest questions we knowingly tried to solve for up front was: “How will this distributed architecture grow overtime and what can we do to streamline the development of an event-driven system?” – and that’s when we discovered Dapr.

Solution

Dapr immediately blew us away with its simple set of APIs that provided an abstraction over the complexities of building a distributed application. Dapr immediately offered solutions to some of our core open questions: secure service to service invocation, developer-friendly debugging, CRON jobs, pub/sub, resiliency, and so much more. It felt like we found an answer to the standard set of questions that every new distributed system faces which often results in teams rolling their own creative solutions to solve what Dapr can provide out of the box. We were able to stand up a completely distributed architecture in Azure in less than one month thanks to Dapr. 

Pub/sub – The pub/sub API is a core part of our platform and a shining example of how development is truly accelerated by Dapr. The pub/sub API enabled the system to begin ingesting telemetry and publishing to a single topic which all services in our architecture subscribe and react accordingly to – with less than 50 lines of application code total! In an IoT solution like Nexa, telemetry is the heartbeat of the system; it’s used for analytics, customized rules and alerts, a real-time dashboard, a digital twin representation in the system map, and more. The best part of the solution is the underlying message provider didn’t matter. We were able to leverage both Azure IoT Hub + Event Hubs and Azure Service Bus. We are able to expand the infrastructure our system integrates with and not worry about rearchitecting the system or refactoring application code or business logic due to changes in SDKs – which is extremely powerful. Without Dapr, we’d have to pull in several different SDKs for the different messaging providers and we’d have to pull in a solution like MassTransit to handle simplifying messaging architecture, which is a .NET focused solution. 

Today, we’re processing over 115 million telemetry events per month with Dapr!

Service invocation – Invoking APIs from other services has become a breeze with Dapr. Without Dapr, we’d need to manage URLs via configuration files and have special accommodation for local development vs when deployed to the cloud, which leads to a tightly coupled system. With Dapr, we’re able to securely communicate across services in a decoupled manner with mTLS out of the box. Taking advantage of Daprs retry policies, developers don’t have to worry about pulling in resiliency libraries (Polly.NET, for example) to build custom circuit breaker implementations, which is a great time saver and language-agnostic feature.

CRON – We take advantage of CRON bindings for several features, but an easy feature to highlight is our offline detection for connected devices. Without Dapr, we’d need to write and deploy custom CRON jobs, which could lead to deploying new infrastructure (Azure Functions or a new Service) or adding new open source scheduling dependencies, similar to Hangfire or Quartz.NET, and becoming familiar with the accompanying SDK. With Dapr, we implement a simple API that is invoked at the desired schedule as defined in the cron binding configuration and implement the core logic of the API. 

SDKs – We didn’t have to hassle with learning and implementing provider-specific SDKs – we just needed to know Dapr’s APIs!

Other bindings & APIs:

State management API – When we need to share state across several services, we leverage Dapr’s state store capabilities, which allows us to remain vendor/technology-agnostic. Instead of needing to install an SDK to talk to Redis, for example, Dapr delivers a consistent set of state store APIs that make it simple to get up and running!

Output bindings – When we need to generate an alert based off of a workflow event, we leverage Dapr’s output binding with Twilio and SendGrid. 

Impact

At Watts, we’re always looking for ways to move faster and reduce cognitive load on our engineering team. Thanks to Dapr, development teams at Watts don’t face the context switching associated with abundant SDKs and the maintenance / nuances between them – we’re able to largely look at integrations through the lens of Dapr. Debugging is a breeze with a local Dapr install which gives developers the confidence they need when deploying new services as well as the hand-off between developers and the DevOps team.

Dapr has become a core technology embedded in each system we’ve built since discovering it in 2022, which includes Nexa and a re-write of our European platform called Vision+. Put simply, Dapr allows our development to focus on business logic and features that deliver a powerful digital experience and it allows our platform team to focus on other areas that Dapr streamlines. Dapr is the de facto choice when building distributed applications at Watts and has been a core part of our ability to move at a rapid pace, empowering us to innovate fearlessly and deliver solutions with unmatched speed and reliability.